


i am brand new and not so whole

by zealotarchaeologist



Category: SOMA (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, some slight hints of catherine being a big gay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-04
Updated: 2016-04-04
Packaged: 2018-05-31 03:25:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6453454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zealotarchaeologist/pseuds/zealotarchaeologist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Simon refuses to make the transfer at Omicron. Catherine does what needs to be done, like she always has.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i am brand new and not so whole

**Author's Note:**

> This is what the people want, right? More introspective Catherine nonsense?

“I can’t believe we’re doing this.”

“It’ll be fine.”

“Then why don’t we put you in the suit?”

“I was going to suggest that if you refused.”

“You’d go without me?”

“I need to do this, Simon. This is important. I need to launch the ARK.”

“You’d really do it—change body?”

“Yes. If you want to stay here, I’m not going to stand in your way. I don’t want to tell you what to do.”

In the end, he can’t do it. Catherine isn’t disappointed, not exactly. But she’s not happy about it either. Still, she pushes that complicated tangle of feelings to the side. The ARK is what matters. If Simon won’t, then she’ll do what has to be done. She always does.

 

There’s nervousness biting at her as she prepares to eject the cortex chip. She’s set up the process—Simon should be able to just stick her in the suit with little issue. And she’s a little excited, actually, to try being in a human body again. The omnitool suits her better, but it’ll be nice not to have to blink in and out of awareness.

It’s just that if anything goes wrong…well, it’s a little hard for her to fully trust her existence to someone else, even Simon. Especially Simon.

But there’s no choice. She has to put her trust in him, blindly hope. He’s her only chance. Which has been true all along, really.

Catherine tries to relax, ejects the chip, and then there’s nothing.

 

“Don’t mind me, Cath, just waiting around to see if you’re alive in there. But uh, take your time. Not like I’m freaking out or anything.” The familiar voice and the faint crackle of the speakers reaches her ears. Catherine looks around in confusion.

She looks around.

Using her head.

Flailing, she steps backward out of the hangar and nearly falls on her ass. It’s been a while since she’s used a human body.

“Catherine!”

“Simon! You did it!”

Even without faces to read, she can tell he’s as happy to see her as she is to see him. It’s strange to really see him, in the physical space. Easier, like this, to see where his body clearly belonged to Imogen, and she has to hold back the sensation of grief lodged tight in her chest.

He puts his hands on her shoulders, steadying the bulky power suit.  “I can’t believe this. I‘m actually touching you!”

“Well, you’re not touching _me_ , exactly.” Her usual body, the body-that-was-Catherine, is several years older and several inches shorter. She’s not sure if she’s just imagining it, but she can feel the difference.

“Stop, I’m trying to be positive.”

She pauses. Then, careful of the suit’s strength, puts her arms around him.

“It’s good to see you, Simon.”

“Yeah. You too.”

 

But there’s work to be done.

“And you’re _absolutely sure_ there’s no other way to get me onto the ARK?”

“Not transferring you from that body to the ARK, no.” No matter how many times she explains it, he doesn’t seem to get it. “I could, uh, rip your cortex chip out and find a way to copy that, maybe—“

“Yeah, that’s not happening.”

“I thought so.”

“But we’ll find a way to get out of here. You’ll come back and we’ll find another way?” He sounds so hopeful. Catherine tries not to resent it, how much he wants her to magically fix everything. She doesn’t _enjoy_ letting him down.

She’s surprised at how much she actually wants to stay alive in this iteration. So she can come back. “If I’m alive, I’ll come back. I can’t do that without you here to call the climber, so don’t do anything reckless.”

“I’m not going anywhere. As long as that door holds.”

The proxy is quiet behind the door now, but the threat remains. “It _will_ hold.”

“It better.”

There’s a long, uncomfortable pause as they both work out the odds. By Catherine’s thinking, they’re not very good odds. She needs to leave now, and fast. Like tearing off a bandage.

She steps into the airlock chamber. “It’s all going to be fine, Simon. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“Wait, Cath.” He grabs her arm and for a second she thinks of Imogen’s hand.

“Just…please don’t leave me alone, up here.”

_I don’t want to._

“I won’t. I’ll call you when the climber gets down.” With a little more force than necessary, she pulls away.

“Okay.”

She swipes the omnitool to activate the airlock before she can look back. “Stay safe, Simon. Don’t forget to pick me up.”

“I won’t. And—“

The heavy airlock door closes, but she can faintly hear him shout _good luck_.

She tries to tell herself that it’s better this way. That no matter how helpful he might have been, this was her journey to make. If regret hasn’t stopped her before, it’s certainly not going to hold her back now.

 

The climber creaks under her weight as she descends. Her use of the power suit is still a little clumsy, but she manages to climb the ladder down into the cage. After that, it’s simply a matter of adjusting the interface and buckling up.

Catherine can imagine how cramped it must have been for her other self, coming down here with four other people.

The darkness drifts by, with only the sound of the creaking climber to keep her company. It’s easy to lose track of time as she drops into the depths. There’s nothing going by she could possibly use to mark her journey. Until little lights start to float past, bioluminescent jellyfish and god knows what else drifting in the dark. They look like colored stars, an inversion of the sky so far above her. It’s strangely beautiful. The neon-like glow reminds her of the city lights she’ll never see again. But it has to mean something that even in this moment, things can still be beautiful.

Even now, there’s life. In all its myriad precious forms, it surrounds her.

But she’s not sad to leave it. When they all make it up there she’ll have fields, forests, blue skies. Maybe a beach, though she suspects none of them will want to go back to the ocean for a while.

The climber shudders. She—she shouldn’t be able to feel a chill going through her, but she can. Something is near.

There. A hand on the edge of the cage. Long and black, one of WAU’s creatures. Catherine starts to stand—the power suit is strong, she can knock it away easily.

But she’s frozen in place. The body isn’t responding to her directions. And the thing is crawling into view now, closer until it stands at full height in front of her, like something out of a sleep paralysis nightmare.

_You’re not him. From before._

Back when she was human, this is when she might have started tearing up. Instead, she keeps her voice as measured and calm as possible. “I’m not. Whatever you’re doing, just—“

_But you have the poison._ It hisses into her mind, its spindly body swaying in the dark water. _I will make preparations._

And it throws itself off the climber.

In a slow wave, motion comes back to her. She flexes her arms and legs as best as she can in the power suit, turns her head back and forth to test the range of motion. Everything is in order. But that was…

It doesn’t matter. As long as it doesn’t get in her way, it doesn’t matter.

The climber lands as gracefully as it possibly can, stirring the sand at the very bottom of the abyss. Even back here she can hear the howling currents.

Beyond here, there’s nothing.

Careful with the console, she dials Omicron from the last working radio. She did promise Simon, after all.

“—Catherine? Hello, Cath? Is that you?”

“It’s me.”

Static crackles over the relay, cutting of his next words. The last of the LUMARs aren’t holding out too well.

“Listen, Simon, I don’t have long. Are you alright up there?”

A pause. Then, “Yeah, I think so.”

“There’s…” She searches for the words to sum up whatever the hell she just saw. “Something strange happened. Have you ever heard any of WAU’s creatures talk to you?”

Catherine can hear the clatter of him slamming his hand on the console. “There was—“

Another rush of static. This isn’t good. “Repeat it, Simon. You’re cutting out.”

“Johan Ross. It’s some dead guy named Johan Ross. Be—“

“—careful, I know.” It comes out terser than she means it to. Ross, Ross, what does she know about Ross? Someone who worked down in the abyss, an AI tech maybe? She doesn’t recall ever speaking to him.

Static silence drifts between them and she can tell he’s waiting, for what she’s not entirely sure. For her to say something comforting, or to reveal that she’s had some plan to save them both all along. But she’s never been good at the first, and as for the latter, well. Simon made the choice to stay up there. It’s not her job, she reminds herself, to take care of him.

Thankfully, he hangs up before she can. She swipes the omnitool across the lock, places a heavy hand on the cage door, and pushes.

 

Traversing the abyss isn’t easy. In a different time she knows she would have found it beautiful, fascinating, but here and now it’s oppressive. Currents rush around her at every side and she can see bodies moving, just outside the lights. Catherine isn’t easily frightened, especially in her current incarnation, but she’s rather avoid the things out there in the dark.

Far worse is the temptation is scattered everywhere. She has the same data reader that Simon did, she could try datamining the radios. Or the bodies. She could know what happened to her team.

It doesn’t matter, she tells herself again and again. What matters is that she makes it to Phi. What matters is that she launches the ARK. Whatever happened down here is no longer relevant.

The closer she gets, the stronger her resolve has to be.

The current batters her now, the heavy power suit moving slower than she ever thought possible. And at the edges of the light, a figure appears now and then, giving off the same almost bio-luminescent glow the WAU does, urging her onward.

She moves on.

 

Tau is not the safe haven she had hoped.

Catherine is curled up under a counter in some lab, trying her utmost to be stealthy in the ungraceful power suit. That thing out there is wearing one too.

She doesn’t know what it is. It was a person, once, but she knows better than anyone that a person is not their body.

But it’s not like the brute at Lambda that tried to crush her before. From a distance, this could be just a human in a power suit. She almost hoped as much, until she saw its face. Nothing but blackness, inky tentacles, structure gel drooling out where a head should be.

It makes her vision glitch at the edges. She’s not sure if it’s the electromagnetism messing with her system or just the fact that her mind isn’t meant to comprehend such a thing.

Finally, it passes, or at least it seems to. Hard to tell how far it went. Carefully, Catherine steps out of the lab into the hallway. She can see the airlock door.

Her chances aren’t great, but she figures if Simon can manage this then so can she.

She takes off at a run, fully used to the power suit by now, and manages to slip by the creature. It’s behind her now, howling in full force, but she reaches for the ladder and—

\--just barely manages to pull herself up out of its reach. She couldn’t slow down even if she wanted to, the fear fueling her borrowed body just as good as a real adrenaline rush. It’s not a feeling she remembers fondly.

 

The habitat that she finally drops into is tainted, overgrown with structure gel. At least there are no more monsters chasing her here, but every so often she can hear Ross projecting his distorted voice. Telling her to kill it.

Catherine has more important things to do.

Everything here is a distraction she can’t afford. She knows what—who—might be in those rooms. Not alive, or they would have come to see what had joined them when she entered Tau. And that’s all she needs to know.

They’re on the ARK now. Their scans are safe. That’s what matters. It’s better this way, really, so she doesn’t have any distractions.

Except when she climbs up to the infirmary, there’s a voice behind the door.

 

“You, you’re…different.”

“Sarah, it’s me.” The words spill out before she can even think about how to approach the situation.

From the way Lindwall’s eyes widen, it’s clear that her voice is coming through even filtered through the suit.

“Catherine?”

Catherine looks away. It doesn’t make any sense, that she can’t do this. But Sarah was…something close to a friend. And always so strong, so full of life. It hurts to see her like this.

But her scan is in the ARK. And the body is not the person.

Panic in her eyes, Lindwall reaches out for the ARK, but her arms are so frail. As gently as she possibly can, Catherine moves her hand aside. She doesn’t want to hurt her, isn’t sure if she could even if she had to. Sarah is so fragile now—with the power suit, Catherine could quite literally snap her bones.

“It’s me.” She tries again, more insistent. Because Lindwall saw the mockingbirds, they all did. None of them would trust one of WAU’s creations, not now. “I’m lucid. I know how it works.” She’s not exactly a sight for sore eyes, but at least she knows she’s not human.

Lindwall nods, but stays wary, glancing between Catherine and her goal.

There’s a strange, sick feeling that creeps up on Catherine at being unrecognized. She never liked being in her body, but this one is hardly any better. Irrationally, she wants to crawl back inside the omnitool and hide. “I just want to launch it. You _know_ me. That’s all I want.”

Apparently it’s the wrong thing to say, because Sarah inhales sharply and looks away. Like she can’t bear to see her. “I know. I’m sorry. I tried to tell them—I’m sorry, Catherine, I let you down—“ Her voice rasps in her throat, betraying how much it must be hurting her to talk.

It feels like something heavy has settled in her chest, weighing her down. It shouldn’t be this way. Catherine is not a strong person. Comforting is not her job. She kneels down so they can be at a more even height, so she can gently put a hand on Sarah’s shoulder and try to calm her because if she starts to cry Catherine doesn’t know what she’s going to do. “You didn’t. You kept it safe all this time, right? You did good, Sarah.”

It only makes her more frantic. “You don’t know, do you? Why it’s still here?”

“I don’t want to. It doesn’t matter now.” Catherine cuts her off, and means it.

For a moment she looks like she’s going to insist, but then she relaxes as much as she possibly can. “It—no, there’s no use arguing with you, is there.” And then it’s like a weight has lifted from her, some unspoken grief that she was carrying.

Catherine would smile if she could. “No, there really isn’t.” It’s an echo of conversations they’ve had a hundred times before.

“Is everyone alright? Back at Theta?”

Her heart drops. Of course. They all came down here so long ago, she wouldn’t know.

“There was no one at Theta. Or anywhere on the plateau.” Which means she’s…

“So I’m the last one? The last living human?”

Catherine understands, empirically, that this is a statement that holds some weight. “I’m. I’m sorry.” She manages, and takes her hand as gently as she possibly can.

A long silence. Then,

“That makes it hard for me to ask this.”

She has a good guess as to where this is going. “Sarah. If you—“

“Just listen. I don’t want to live like this. Drying up and waiting to die. You understand, right? You’ve already got me in there. I’ll just have to…settle for that.”

It’s not as if she doesn’t understand. In fact, she agrees. But she wants to weigh the circumstances first. If she needs Lindwall’s help again, later on—

“Please, Catherine. I’m tired.”

Catherine forces herself to look at her, to really look. Lindwall…isn’t doing well. She’s surprised she made it this long. She used to be so strong, so untouchable. She took care of Catherine.

It’s only fair that Catherine take care of her.

“Alright. I’m. I’m turning it off now.”

“Will you stay with me? I won’t be long now, just. Please just stay.”

“Of course.” This is her duty, as much as launching the ARK is. To bear witness to the end of this era of humanity. Maybe this has to happen, so they can start a new one.

“At least I won’t have to turn 30.” She tries to smile at her own joke, but it makes something tighten in Catherine’s chest. She forgot, really, how young Lindwall is. There’s a profound sense of _wrongness_ —things shouldn’t have happened this way.

Her breathing is strained now, but she clutches Catherine’s hand with surprising strength. “So many things I wish I could’ve done. Wish I could’ve seen home one last time. You would have liked it there.”

“You know what? I prefer it this way. I liked PATHOS, I liked everyone. I liked you.” And that’s not a shock—she had said as much before, but it’s different this way. It means more that she still feels that way even though this is, in some part, Catherine’s fault for bringing them down here.

If she were human, this is where she would smile, tears at the corners of her eyes. She squeezes Lindwall’s hand tighter. “I liked you, too.”

“You’ll take care of her, won’t you?” She says with a sudden urgency, and there’s no question as to who she’s talking about. The Sarah Lindwall on the ARK doesn’t know that this, any of it, happened. She’s waiting in there, all of them are, safe from this. Catherine _will_ take care of her. She’ll take care of all of them.

She wants to respond, but Sarah—this Sarah—is already gone. Catherine reaches out and gently closes the body’s eyelids. It seems only right.

It’s better this way, she knows. Better that she not suffer any longer.

When she picks up the ARK it’s heavy, heavier than she thought. But that seems right too. It should weigh something, it should mean something.

Purposefully not looking at the body, she lifts the ARK into the elevator and sends it down.

Catherine turns the light off when she leaves. The sun has set on that era of humanity. She’s just tying up the loose ends.

 

The tunnel creaks around her, louder and louder as the ARK picks up speed. Catherine jogs to keep up with it, dodging floating debris all the while. She’s anxious to get out. It feels like the place is going to collapse any minute.

Her gut feeling isn’t wrong. There’s a body in the tunnel, crushed under stone and metal. Even with the strength of the suit, it would take her a day at least to dig this out. There has to be another way. She turns back to examine the tunnel, thinking.

Then all of a sudden her vision is glitching. She would grit her teeth if she still had them, the way she always used to when she had a migraine.

_We’re so close now. Hurry._

Ross’ twitching figure manifests in a burst of electromagnetism. And when she dares to glance up again, there’s a tunnel through the wall where she hadn’t noticed one before.

Catherine isn’t so single-minded that she doesn’t see what’s happening. She’s being led. But she doesn’t have the luxury of options.

It’s a difficult fit, getting the bulky power suit through the tunnel. Her mind still fills in the gaps with her old human body, small and slight. She breathes in relief when she makes it out, but what lies on the other side is more than a little unnerving. The WAU’s influence is obvious here, not the little black growths in the stations but massive pipes around the canyon, like stretching limbs. It gets worse the further she walks.

(Still, there is always life. If she had a face she would smile at the little creatures congregating around the thermal vents.)

_This is where it all went wrong. Site Alpha._

The WAU’s tentacles all seem to be leading into this building, a station built into the nearby rock. Site Alpha isn’t real. At least it isn’t supposed to be. Just a creepy rumor that goes around every so often. And yet.

She doesn’t even need to open the airlock. The warden has done the work for her.

It’s clearly a contemporary station. It looks much like Tau did on the inside, only much worse off, the entire place overgrown with structure gel. She struggles through the water of the darkened corridors, the little lights from the WAU guiding her way. If she’s not mistaken, coming out on the other side of this station will give her a straight shot to Phi.

She lifts a heavy door and struggles into what looks like an overgrown server room. The WAU’s limbs are entwined with its brain. Catherine knows better than most that it’s not sentient, not malicious, doesn’t plot with intent. But here in its nest, she can see why people would think otherwise.

As she goes deeper, Alpha barely even looks like a station anymore. Structure gel isn’t coming out of the walls so much as it’s replaced them entirely.

_We’re so close._

“Close to what?” she sighs in frustration. This isn’t getting her anywhere closer to where she needs to be. The cancerous growths are massive here, it feels like the whole station is closing in on her.

_I need you to stop the WAU._

If Catherine still had eyes, she would roll them. She has more important things to do than—whatever this is. Her vision pulses around the edges as she moves ever forward.

_You’re the only one who can. The enslaved protein sloshing around your suit is the noose from which the WAU will hang itself._

“I don’t have time for this.”

_It should have been him. He found the toxin, picked up where the girl left off._

Catherine almost feels bad. Because she knows what he means—Simon is pliable, easy to persuade with just a little pushing and some positive reinforcement. It’s exactly how she’s been using him all along.

The gel-slick tunnel opens up into a chamber more massive than she could have possibly expected. The WAU has commandeered the space, bursting from every side, a massive growth in the middle that can only be its source. It’s _gross_. Looking at it feels like how it felt to step in something cold and slimy. But it’s also a marvel, really. Compared to her own work it’s an unfortunate specimen, but when she thinks about what it must have taken to make this, how advanced the intelligence is—

_All you need to do is push your arm into it. Kill it. It will accept you, it has no choice._

The electromagnetism nearly takes her out. He’s laying it on thick now, must be trying to stop the WAU from reaching him. From neutralizing the threat.

She doesn’t know this Ross, doesn’t trust him any farther than she could throw him, but he’s not entirely wrong. While the Warden itself can’t be called good or evil, she knows its creatures are a threat to her. If she kills it, that’s one less potential obstacle in her way.

But it’s a risk. For all she knows, as soon as she steps near that thing it’ll kill her. Could probably crush everything in the room just by flexing. That’s not a chance she can afford to take.

Keeping her gaze on the door at the other side of the room, she starts walking.

_No! You can’t leave! We’re not done!_

“Wait and I’ll be back.” She says plainly to the flickering form, and it’s not a lie. “I have something I need to do.” She sidesteps a pipe and taps the door’s seal. It opens without complaint, leading her down another black tunnel.

_If you don’t finish this, I’ll make you._

The rage in his tone is nothing like the pleading from before. It makes her skin crawl. She was right not to trust him. She picks up the pace.

_Fine._ He hisses in her head. _Have it your way._

And before she can question what that means, what feels like a crackling wave slams into her, and her senses go dark.

She comes to a moment later, the imagined sound of her heart pounding filling her head. The rhythm of her entire being beating in pure desperation. She struggles, writhes on the ground with all the strength she has. “Let me leave!” she snarls. “You don’t know what you’re doing!”

_Don’t be a fool. This is bigger than both of us._

“Exactly! Which is why you need to—“

_Enough of your little project._ He sneers. _You brought them down here. What did you accomplish? Did you see what became of them?_

He takes advantage of her stunned silence to move forward.

_You can let them rest. All you need to do—_

Catherine rolls to the side the moment before it bursts from the floor, something massive and many-toothed that crunches down on the spindly body before her, swallowing it in an instant. A trail of blood in the water where Ross once stood.

And just as quick, it dives back into the underbelly of the station. She wastes no time pulling herself to her feet. Despite how her senses still protest, she does her best to push the body into a run. That thing could be back any second.

She makes it through the tunnel this time, out into the open water. A horrible roar, the sound of metal scraping on metal rings out behind her. The thing is fucking following her. She doesn’t dare to look back, but she doesn’t have to—it circles in front of her, its body even more massive than she realized. But Phi isn’t far. All she needs to do is make this one final sprint.

The leviathan shrieks behind her. Better get moving.

 

Never would Catherine have expected any station to feel more comforting than Theta. But Phi is blessedly, blessedly free of monsters and she’d take anything over the open water at this point. She makes a mental note to apologize to Simon for all the times she told him to suck it up about the WAU’s creatures. That is, if she ever speaks to him again.

Phi is easy to navigate and she finds the main terminal quickly. It only takes a little technical persuasion to get the station up and running. She picks through the computers and finds very little. There’s an explanation of the gun, a map, a log of exit and entry which she lingers on for a moment.

It’s a moment too long. According to this, the original Catherine and her team did make it here. But she didn’t leave with the rest of them.

She’s not sure whether it would be worse to find herself alive or dead.

But it doesn’t matter. There’s nowhere to go but onward.

The ARK is waiting safely for her, still attached to the tram.  Catherine unhooks it and holds it close. It’s still so strange to actually see all her work, all everyone’s work manifest in the physical space. She’s not letting it out of her sight again.

All systems appear to be go, so she heads towards the loading platform, the ARK still tucked under her arm. If she’s lucky, nothing will be wrong, and she can just load it and launch.

 

She’s not lucky. Not exactly.

Her body—the body—lies conspicuously on the floor on the loading platform. Every moment that she spends ignoring it feels like hours, but Catherine is nothing if not determined. What happened before _does not matter_. What matters is she gets the ARK up there. Gingerly, she loads it into the casing and directs the bullet out to the space gun.

It should feel like a small victory as she walks to the door. But she makes the mistake of looking back.

It doesn’t matter.

She crouches over the body that used to be hers. It wasn’t so bad, her human body. Inconveniently small, maybe, but she was strong enough. And pretty in her own way, even though she was getting on in years.

The cause of death is clear. Open head wound. The wrench nearby on the floor, most likely. She should be satisfied with that knowledge.

It doesn’t matter.

She reaches out, like she saw Simon do so many times, and connects to her own blackbox.

The moment she lives—relives—is muffled, as if she’s hearing it through radio static. But it’s enough. It’s enough for her to know.

They killed her. Accident or not, they _killed_ her. That’s what stopped her from launching the ARK. Not the WAU, not the whole end of the goddamn world, but the few people who she trusted. The few people she might have thought of as friends.

The worst part is that after the initial shock wears off, she can’t even bring herself to feel surprised.

Catherine strokes her own hair, parting it so it covers the wound. There’s no point in pretending, but she wants to. She can keep telling herself it’s better this way.

 

It hits her as she’s at the main console, performing the operation that will tie her upload to the ARK launch. Catherine can’t forget what she’s seen, but the people in there, her teammates in there, they won’t remember. No one will remember any of the terrible things that have happened. Even her other self will be as blissfully ignorant as she was when she woke up in Lambda two days ago.

Her other self. She really hasn’t thought about this at all.

Of course she was going to upload herself before they launched. Sure, she wasn’t nearly as concerned with it as Simon was, but it seemed the obvious thing to do.

Now she’s not so sure. Is there a place for her there? Among people who never even liked her in life? Among people who killed her? If there ever was, that place surely belongs to her earlier self.

But she doesn’t know if she’s going to make it back up the plateau. And she, the Catherine that she is now, doesn’t want to die. With no one to remember her but Simon, still waiting up there. If she dies down here, no one will remember what she’s seen. No one will remember the people who died lonely at the bottom of the ocean. No one will remember that Sarah Lindwall clung viciously to life to protect the rest of them. No one will remember Simon, who helped her save people he didn’t even know, even if he didn’t understand.

It doesn’t matter if she has a place up there. What she _does_ have is a job to do.

When the ARK launches, her copy will go with it.

 

The pilot seat is easy to use, though fairly cramped. It reminds her of being in the omnitool, actually, the way what _feels_ like flexing a muscle produces an entirely different result in the physical world.

After loading the gun, she pauses to prepare herself. This is what she worked for. This is what the body on the floor down there died for.

Catherine initiates the launch.

The upload is slow, but she isn’t worried. If she doesn’t get on, she doesn’t get on. What matters is that they make it, through the water and the debris and the atmosphere. There’s nothing she can do but hope with all her being as the countdown moves steadily towards an unknown outcome.

With a shudder that rocks the entire station, the gun launches. Catherine scrambles for the console, trying to track the payload. It breaks the ocean surface and for a split second she imagines being there, watching the world on fire—and then it’s through the atmosphere and gone.

It’s done. It’s over.

She launched the ARK.

All the work she did. Everything she sacrificed. Everyone who was hurt. It’s all over, and she’s still alive.

Behind the triumph there’s a hollowness. Her whole life, which for her is technically barely more than a day, was building towards that moment. Now that the moment has passed, what is she supposed to do with herself? Does she even _want_ to do anything more than this? She’s tired. It’s been a long day and a longer life. Catherine sighs, her borrowed body relaxes as if she were really breathing.

The station groans in response, the console suddenly beeping at her for attention.

Phi is cutting power. The gun took too much.

If she wants to leave, she has to leave now.

She pulls the omnitool out of the terminal and runs. The lights are clicking off behind her, one by one. If she can just make it through the airlock then she can still manage this, still find a way to turn the power back on.

No longer gentle, she slams the button on the airlock door. Slowly, it starts to creak open—then stops. The door switch isn’t lit up any more, and as she turns around, neither is anything else.

She blinks her flashlight on, mostly out of habit. Even the emergency lights are out. And there’s no other way back into Phi—she would know, after how carefully she planned this. She could climb the gun out into the ocean, if she was truly desperate. But she’s not desperate, not at all. There’s nothing left for her here.

So this is it, then.

There’s no panic, or despair, or much of anything really. Because she’s done everything she needed to do, she’s played her part. Catherine is going to slowly die down here, but Catherine is up there, and everything will be alright.

_I’m sorry, Simon._ She thinks as she slowly sits, letting her legs hang off the walkway into the deep black water. _I don’t think I’m coming back._

He’ll be mad, of course. She can imagine it. He’ll wait until it’s clear that she’s not coming back and then he’ll—he’ll assume she got on the ARK, not just copied herself, and left him there alone. Maybe he’ll even think that was her plan all along. At least, she hopes so. Because that at least would stop him from doing anything stupid like coming down here.

She blinks the light off and rolls onto her back. It’s hard to do in the power suit, but she might as well get comfortable. It’s going to be a good long while before her battery runs out. Maybe she’ll change her mind eventually, try to climb the space gun, but going back up there would mean dealing with what comes next. Dealing with the fact that everyone she knew is dead and the planet is a smoldering wreck. For now all she wants to do is close the eyes she doesn’t have and finally rest.

Catherine stares up into the water. It’s not the same lively beauty of the ecosystems of the plateau, but there’s still life, visible and invisible. That’s the nice thing about the ocean. There will always be life. Long before she was here and long after she’s gone.

If she tries, she can almost pretend that she’s back home, on the roof of her building, looking up at the smog-darkened night sky.


End file.
